Thoughts on JFK @ 100

For more than 25 years, I’ve been studying the life of John F. Kennedy — who was born 100 years ago today.

When I was 9, I read a biography for kids about the 35th president. Ever since, I have been fascinated with his life and legend. He appealed to me in the 1980’s and 1990’s for the same reasons he appealed to Americans in the 1960's: he was young; handsome; energetic; intelligent; and he made people feel a sense of excitement they had not felt in a long time. I began reading about his life, but inevitably was drawn to learning about that terrible day in Dallas that ended it.

I spent the next few years (at the height of the conspiracy theories buzz surrounding Oliver Stone’s “JFK”) reading and trying to solve the mystery that had eluded professionals for a generation. Needless to say, I was unsuccessful.

By the time I graduated from high school, I was still interested in the assassination, but felt that Kennedy’s deeds should be examined more than the last five seconds of his life.

Kennedy inspired an entire generation of Americans to not only believe in something bigger than themselves but to fight for it. His rhetoric and his young, beautiful family made people think that Americans could accomplish anything.

As an adult, I am not naive enough to think that Jack Kennedy didn’t have any faults or failings. Plenty of new information has surfaced over the last five decades. He was a womanizer and a serial philanderer. Some of his relationships were with purported spies and the girlfriends of known mobsters. Because of his health, he took medication while on the job that may have compromised his mental state.

But I don’t care.

John F. Kennedy was a man as well as the President of the United States. He had parents, siblings, friends — and even a grandmother — who loved him (JFK was the only president who was outlived by both of his parents and a grandparent).

He had a young wife (Jackie was only 34 when he was killed) and two children who adored and depended on him.

And then — in a flash — it was all gone.

I was born almost 15 years after President Kennedy was killed. Songs, television and movies have meshed with the reality of what happened. The Zapruder Film — which seems ingrained in our public consciousness — was not shown to the American public until 12 years after the assassination.

It’s easy for my generation and the ones who follow to think the gruesome images were always out there as part of the collective memory. But they weren’t. And they really are gruesome.

I eventually decided that we will never know what really happened all those years ago in Texas. I think Lee Harvey Oswald was absolutely a shooter. Was he the only one? Was someone else involved? The Cubans? The Soviets? The Mafia? I have no idea. So I stopped thinking about it.

President Kennedy’s assassination still bothers Americans because it ended what could have been. Only three years into his term of office, he was becoming the leader he was meant to be. He had prevailed during the Cuban Missile Crisis and no doubt saved all of humanity in the process. He pushed us to go to space “not because it is easy but because it is hard.” In 1963, he had started to make Civil Rights a priority for his administration and the nation. Only the day before he left for Texas, he was considering every option on the impending war in Vietnam — including an all out withdrawal.

Then, it was all gone.

The images of the assassination and the three days of mourning are heart-wrenching even all these decades later. Jackie in her blood-stained suit and the ill-fated John Jr. — on his 3rd birthday — saluting his father’s casket are forever ingrained in our national consciousness.

I wonder for how long, though. Will my three kids care at all about President Kennedy other than through the prism of educationally-mandated history books? Will they care anymore about Kennedy than I do about William McKinley or James K. Polk?

I would like to believe the answer is a resounding “yes”. Jack Kennedy’s life and presidency are fascinating because neither were ever completed.

And now, on his centennial, we remember his life and think about what might have been. As President Kennedy himself put it:

”A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.”

The idea of John Kennedy lives on in those he inspired and continues to inspire, even after a century. We can only hope it lives on for the next 100 years.